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URL redirect/rewrite using the .htaccess file

Summary

By default your website can be accessed with both www.example.com and example.com. Since
Google penalizes this due to duplicated content reasons, you should restrict the access to either www.example.com or example.com.
Some links may be outside of your website scope and/or the search engines may have already indexed your website under both addresses.

Your primary .htaccess file is located in your public_html folder. To see how to access this file please see our .htaccess Tutorial.

Let's have a look at the example 1 - Redirect example.com to
www.example.com. The first line tells apache to start the rewrite module. The next line:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]

specifies that the next rule only fires when the http host (that means the domain of the
queried url) is not (- specified with the "!") www.example.com.

The $ means that
the host ends with www.example.com - and the result is that all pages
from www.example.com will trigger the following rewrite rule. Combined
with the inversive "!" is the result every host that is not
www.example.com will be redirected to this domain.

The [NC]
specifies that the http host is case insensitive. The escapes the "." - because
this is a special character (normally, the dot (.) means that one
character is unspecified).

The final line describes the action that should be executed:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The ^(.*)$ is a little magic trick. Can you remember the meaning of the dot? If not, this can be
any character(but only one). So .* means that you can have a lot of
characters, not only one. This is what we need because ^(.*)$
contains the requested url, without the domain.

The next part
http://www.example.com/$1 describes the target of the rewrite rule. This is our "final" used
domain name, where $1 contains the content of the (.*).

The next part is also important, since it does the 301
redirect for us automatically: [L,R=301]. L means this is the
last rule in this run. After this rewrite the webserver will return a
result. The R=301 means that the webserver returns a 301 moved
permanently to the requesting browser or search engine.

Redirect to example.com/index.php

You have a website with the name example.com and you want to
redirect all incoming urls that are going to example.com/ to
example.com/index.php

What does this code above do? Let's have a look at Example 1 -
Redirect example.com to www.example.com. The first line starts the rewrite
module. The next line:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !www.example.com$

specifies that the next rule only fires when the http host (that means
the domain of the queried url) is not (- specified with the "!")
www.example.com.

The $ means that the host ends with www.example.com - and
the result is that all pages from example.com will trigger the
following rewrite rule. Combined with the inversive "!" is the result
every host that is not www.example.com will be redirected to this
domain.

The [NC] specifies that the http host is case insensitive. The
escapes the "." - because this is a special character (normally, the
dot (.) means that one character is unspecified).

The final line describes the action that should be executed:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301].

The ^(.*)$ is a little magic trick. Remember the meaning of the dot? If not, this
can be any character(but only one). The .* means that you can have a
lot of characters, not only one. This is what was intended.
^(.*)$ contains the requested url, without the domain.

The next part
http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301] describes the target of the
rewrite rule -this is the "final" used domain name, where $1 contains the content
of the (.*).

The next part is also important, since it does the 301
redirect for us automatically: [L,R=301]. L means this is the last
rule in this run. After this rewrite the webserver will return a
result. The R=301 means that the webserver returns a 301 moved
permanently to the requesting browser or search engine.

Redirect visitors to a new site

You have an old website that is accessible under oldexample.com and you
have a new website that is accessible under newexample.com. Copying
the content of the old website to the new website is the first step -
but what comes after that? You should do a 301 moved permanently
redirect from the old domain to the new domain - which is easy and has
some advantages:

Users will automatically be redirected to the new domain - you do not have to inform them.

Search engines will be redirected to the new domain and all related information will
be moved to the new domain (but this might take some time).

Google's PageRank â„¢ will be transfered to the new domain, as well as other internal information
that is being used to set the position of pages in the search engine result pages (serp's) - like TrustRank .

Create a 301 redirect for all http requests that are going to the old domain.

How to add a trailing slash

Some search engines remove the trailing slash from urls that look like
directories - e.g. Yahoo does it. However it could result into
duplicated content problems when the same page content is accessible
under different urls. Apache gives some more information in the Apache
Server FAQ.

Let's have a look at an example: example.com/google/ is indexed in
Yahoo as example.com/google - which would result in two urls with the
same content.

The solution is to create a .htaccess rewrite rule that adds the
trailing slashes to these urls. Example - redirect all urls that
do not have a trailing slash to urls with a trailing slash: